Tag Archive: Lawsuit

Promoted by Rosi Historic A historic gathering quietly took place on January 7, 2016, in Washington DC that may have broad positive implications for Native Americans in the United States. The purpose of the event was to file tort claims…Read more

Here’s a national headline we’re dealing with today in Hunterdon: Yes, as former New Jerseyan Donald Trump insists in the face of the Constitution that he’d ban all Muslim immigration, and part-time New Jerseyan Chris Christie raises the spectre of…Read more

When Gov. Christie’s back is to the wall because of problems/issues/mistakes/scandals/random crap that arises on his watch – or due to his own direct policy and decisions, Christie reverts to type. He blames others, and by name to avoid dirt sticking to him. Where, frankly, it often belongs.

And so it is that we get Christie’s statement of today as the Exxon Mobil controversy reaches critical mass and national news. This is Chris Christie trying to govsplain away what he just got caught doing, by trying to throw Bradley Campbell – who was commissioner of NJ DEP when the Exxon lawsuits were filed and wrote this in the N Y Times yesterday – under the bus.

New Jersey has a long, and awful history with industrialpollution and its residents have suffered for it. But here’s a part of NJ history – with brave women who fought back though they could barely walk, a landmark case and a milestone in regulation and labor safety – and I knew almost nothing about it. I went to school in New York; talk to me about Love Canal. I didn’t know about the Radium Girls, or the Radium Superfund sites in Bloomfield, Glen Ridge, Montclair, West Orange and East Orange. Read on, and if you know more than I did, feel free to chime in. – Rosi

Earlier this year, Mae Keane died in Middlebury, Connecticut. She was, at 107, the last of the Radium Girls.

Had she been more obedient, more apt to be bullied into compliance by her bosses and the corporation for which she worked at 18, she might have ended up like most of the other Radium Girls. Some of them never made it out of their teens. One young woman was sent to the dentist to have a tooth pulled. One yank and her whole jaw came out. Women collapsed; their legs suddenly giving out, their bones porous and breaking underneath them. There was cancer. Early death. And the company tried to blame the women. Typical.

As my colleague Sen. Shirley Turner told the Trentonian, the Trenton Board of Education will now be suing the State. They’re taking this step after almost a decade of community activists, parents, Trenton Central High School teachers and legislators trying to get the State funding to fix or to rebuild TCHS’s decaying structure.

This law suit is long overdue. Trenton has been on the waiting list for SDA (School Development Authority) funding for too long. Sure, Trenton folks would like to pay for school construction projects on its own, but it gets little state funding now. Remember, suburban schools were offered 40% for their school construction costs while formerly-Abbott districts (30 urban schools) were promised 100%. Notwithstanding, if the State paid its fair share of property taxes on all its State buildings in the capital city it is estimated that it would be $40 million. It used to do so in the form of PILOT (Payments-In-Lieu-Of-Property-Taxes), but it has eroded over time and under the current Administration there is no PILOT.

Right wing New Jerseyan and serial misrepresenter of facts James O’Keefe has decided that what’s good for the goose is not good for the gander, and is suing the Star-Ledger for libel on the heels of his latest “operation” that just may have broken a number of federal and/or New Hampshire laws. Ironically, O’Keefe is the same person behind the heavily edited and usually recorded without consent videos used to “implicate” Planned Parenthood, ACORN, NPR and the New Jersey teacher’s union (the NJEA) in acts that looked bad mainly because of the deceptive and selective editing.

His latest is a lawsuit alleging that he was defamed by the Star Ledger when it reported on the potential voter fraud and non-consent laws for recording conversations that his “sting operation” broke during the NH Republican Presidential Primary. While the Star Ledger incorrectly referred to O’Keefe’s prior history as including “trying to tap the phone of Sen. Mary Landrieux” – which was a federal felony charge, O’Keefe did plead guilty to a misdemeanor for entering federal property under false pretenses, a different and lesser crime, but most certainly a crime.

The misdemeanor charge carried a sentence that included three years’ probation, and it remains to be seen what the impact of the NH actions and investigation by the NH Attorney General will have on O’Keefe’s probation, or his “filmmaking career”. What is highly ironic here (other than the nature of his suit not even mentioning the NH investigation – just a years’ old different crime that was called a crime of a different name) is that the ACORNs, NPRs, Planned Parenthoods, NH voters and NJ teachers union who were unfairly and misrepresented by O’Keefe and his videos for are really the ones damaged. The fact that O’Keefe is playing victim for what looks like the Star Ledger calling Crime B “Crime A” seems more like another stunt to get publicity than anything else.

This is classic for the right and its noise machine – to hammer away on a relatively minor and sometimes insignificant point to play the victim – all while distorting the truth in the name of whatever endgame they have at the moment. What would really make things interesting is for the Star Ledger to use its resources to fight back here – a retraction would probably be warranted to the extent it did misrepresent the crime O’Keefe pled guilty to – and maybe it teaches the folks on the Star Ledger Editorial Board to be more careful. But to push back against O’Keefe, his financial backers and take “disclosure” down a very uncomfortable road for O’Keefe would really be a good thing to see.

Somebody sent me to Americablog a few days ago because I was in a crap mood, and Americablog had a frontpaged video of 3 kittens spinning around on turntables. Anybody who knows me knows that kind of thing actually works on me. I reposted kittens to my facebook and got on with my day. Why don’t we have more kitten videos at Blue Jersey?

But, I digress. Next to the spinning orange kittens was a link to Americablog’s new collection of New York-flavored tee-shirts. Each, an expansion of the iconic Milton Glaser design known around the world. Which, ironically, was designed in the 1970s, when NYC was considerably less “lovable”. Less lovable, the way New Jersey feels to me right now. Want to take a guess how much money that logo is hauling in for New York? Or, take a crack at this: How much in tourism dollars New York is about to see from their forward-thinking legislative decision.

I remember when we were lobbying NJ legislators in the run-up to the Senate marriage equality vote January of last year. There were so many reasons to urge support; one was tourism. I was in the room, when that case was made to Sen. Steve Sweeney. Didn’t work.

In October, I get to watch two good friends, two men I love separately but especially together, get married on a boat in New York waters. There’s water in New Jersey, too, and I imagine this wedding and many others, and a lot of NJ tourism dollars, will go to the city and state that invites it, a city and state that recognizes all of us more fully.

This Sunday, Garden State Equality is holding a rally to celebrate New York State’s first-ever day of marriage equality. Co-host is Lambda Legal, which is now coming at Jersey equal marriage through NJ’s courts. Couples at the center of that lawsuit will be there. Love will be in the air, both in New York, and across the water in Hoboken, where this rally will take place. The location is symbolic. Hoboken’s Pier A Park is only a half-mile across the water from New York and another measure of equality. So close.

Disclosure: I serve on the board of Garden State Equality. I’d write about this even if I didn’t.

Here is why I believe Chief Yonaguska Holloway of the New Jersey Sand Hill Band of Indians and why I DON’T believe Claire Garland of Neptune who claims to be Sand Hill, despite the plaintive cries of her Ramapough defenders. In honor of Claire, who loves photos, here is some evidence:

Photos of Chief Crummel, Lone Bear Revey and real members of the Sand Hill taken in the 1940’s, around the time the Smithsonian wrote that they were the only continuously operating tribe of Lenape left in NJ.

You may remember, Chief Crummel is the Great Grandfather of Arleen Richards – The Chief Justice and Attorney for the New Jersey Sand Hill Band of Lenape and Cherokee Indians. Why would Arleen Richards defend Holloway in his case unless she was protecting the history of her very own great grandfather and her myriad family who are members of the New Jersey Sand Hill Band of Lenape and Cherokee Indians? In the photos you can also spot Lone Bear – who received his Indian name LONG before he became Chief and was hardly all by himself. After Lone Bear became Chief he appointed Sam Beeler to succeed him shortly before his death in 1998. Upon Chief Lone Bear Revey’s death, Sam Beeler was installed as Chief by Tribal Council. This was BEFORE the Indian Commission seated the current crop of characters there now.

Claire Garland actually knew Sam Beeler personally when she stood before the NJ Indian Commission and swore up and down she didn’t know who he was. If she had been sworn in – she could be nailed for PERJURY. Here is the PHOTO of Claire Garland with Sam Beeler at an event. Perhaps if this case is allowed to go to trial someone WILL swear Claire in and she will come clean. God knows she was sweating profusely when she appeared and denied knowing Beeler in front of the Commission.

From Claire Garland’s newsletter summer 2006 when she was just a lady starting a little club to talk about Indians. In black and white, in her own newsletter, Claire Garland openly and proudly acknowledges Sam Beeler as CHAIRMAN of the Sand Hill Band of Indians TRIBAL COUNCIL based in PATERSON (not Monmouth). This was BEFORE she got amnesia and forgot who Sam Beeler was and trashed him at a NJ Commission meeting. What I want to know is, who hit her in the head and gave her amnesia?

This is how Claire started her own little “tribe” established in 2006 – A membership form for a HISTORICAL ORGANIZATION asking for money to join. From the same newsletter where she touts Chief Sam Beeler in 2006:

On June 30, 2010 Judge Katherine Hayden ruled that she will NOT allow the last Lenape tribe in NJ to use most of the evidence, facts and data that proves their case. Things like Title VI, the 14th Amendment, the Ku Klux Klan Act, the Non-Intercourse Act, State contract law, Federal laws protecting burial grounds & artifacts, and enforcement of treaties. Essentially EVERYTHING – laws, facts, precedent, that would result in the oldest Indian Tribe in NJ winning their case.

Before the tribe was represented by legal counsel, Chairman Ronald Holloway, Red Chief in a long line stemming from the original Lenape Blood Chiefs, addressed his tribe’s right to water rights, natural resources, hunting rights and the over 3000 acres of land that from 1758 to 1802 was known as Brotherton Reservation. Chairman Holloway did this in nearly 100 pages of documents that referenced Indian cases from across the nation and long accepted and understood Federal law.

Following is the legal timeline regarding the lawsuit of the oldest indigenous Native American tribe still found in New Jersey – the NJ Sand Hill Band of Lenape and Cherokee Indians vs. the State of New Jersey. The Tribe has appealed to the UN to try this case in the World Court. The territory involved now includes Manhattan, Delaware, and Pennsylvania as well as New Jersey.